Tuesday, March 3, 2009

I still exist

So you ("you" being the 3.5 people who read my blog) may or may not have noticed that I've been pretty quiet lately. Reason: real life is getting in the way. Between school and people and contemplating life issues, there has been no time for much else. Besides, blogging has a niceness of about +15 (even lower priority than slashdot!).

SBP elections are today. What political drama...but I actually voted this time because it requires no voting fee (free is good!) and my vote might actually have a minor say (~1000 votes total => 0.1% of the votes are mine). Both candidates are pretty good this year, and it will be interesting to see who wins.

I had some excitement the other day with my compy. Once in a while a HDD cable will become loose, or something happens that causes the hard drive to stop communicating with the system. So I'll do fun stuff like "ls: command not found"--that's my cue to check the cables. After several reboots and messing with my compy's guts, I couldn't get the hard drives to show up in the BIOS, so I was left with Windows until I was able to fix it the next day. I ended up replacing the cables and blowing the dust out before they worked again.

When I booted, KDE started automatically with default settings instead of the expected Fluxbox. Oops. I load up a terminal and come to find my /home partition is not mounted, nor can it be mounted. Then I FREAKED OUT. I thought all my data could be gone, especially after fsck told me there was "an error" on the partition and exited. Fortunately, another run of fsck scanned the partition, found the corrupted data, and fixed the problem. A reboot started me up with my /home intact. The very next thing I did was to rsync my /home to my external hard drive.